


Realism and satisfaction in Lovely Little Losers

by anonsally



Category: Lovely Little Losers
Genre: Essays, Meta, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 14:26:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5747833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonsally/pseuds/anonsally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Essay on what I loved about Lovely Little Losers, despite the elements that weren't very "satisfying", as Freddie would say.<br/>(originally posted on Tumblr on 22 December 2015)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Realism and satisfaction in Lovely Little Losers

**Everything that is “unsatisfying” about Lovely Little Losers is necessitated by the Candle Wasters’ commitment to realism.**

They started with an implausible premise, and found a way to write a story around that constraint–including setting it up so that we would at least be willing to suspend our disbelief concerning the premise–and also to tell that story in a particular format: the vlog. This was an additional constraint, and quite a significant one. And then, keeping within these constraints, they tried to tell the story _as realistically as possible_.

Here are a few things I found sort of unsatisfying, and why I think the videos could not have satisfied me without sacrificing realism (and then some further thoughts):

  * **We didn’t really see much of Freddie and Kit together, and much of what we saw was disturbing:** The thing is, confirmation that they were together came at a very fraught time. Their relationship had to be secret from Ben, who was enforcing the Rules with the camera, and Freddie hated the camera anyway. So the viewers couldn’t know about it until everything fell apart. Freddie’s effort to ask Kit what he wants (even if she did so in a control-freak way) and her asking permission to hit him with a pillow during the pillow fight tell us that she is trying to treat him better, and that’s the best we could hope for. Neither of them is the type to process their relationship issues on camera.
  * **We don’t get a clarification of what was going on in Peter’s head the first few months in Wellington:** But that was a dark time in his life, and he may not even be able to articulate much beyond the idea that he was pushing Balthazar away. Even if he can talk about it, he probably wouldn’t want to do so on camera for Ben.
  * **We don’t know whether Ben and Bea ever talked through their actual issues, or discussed what Ben’s struggles have been:** But Ben has been trying (with decreasing success) to conceal that stuff from the viewers and his friends for the whole year. So I don’t think he would suddenly put it online now. 



I totally respect the choices that the Candle Wasters made about what not to show us, because **one of the things that makes vlog-format webseries so compelling to me is the immersive aspect** : the characters ostensibly exist in the same time-structure I do, allowing me to feel that they are “real” in a way that characters in a book or a movie or a regular TV show are not. Because I am not immersing myself in the lolilo world; these young New Zealanders are immersed in my world, and their story unfolds in real time.

**And if they are real, then they don’t owe me anything.**

In fact, I would argue that one central message of the series is that in order to be realistic, it had to be unsatisfying. The show is all about how a couple getting together isn’t a tidy ending, a happily-ever-after. Love isn’t enough, either for two people to get together or for them to stay together. Real life is messy. Relationships take work, ongoing communication and honesty, continuing efforts to treat one another well. This show is a **critique of the romantic comedy genre** and of the vlog format for literary adaptations.

What’s interesting is how sneakily it was done: many of us thought that we were watching the story of Pedrazar. And, I mean, we were. But _that’s the story that Ben **wanted** to tell us_. Only gradually did it become clear that Ben was hiding something, that there was a whole other story happening off camera, that Ben’s story was complicated, wasn’t the happily-ever-after with Bea that we sort of assumed it was.

There were three major love stories going on in Lovely Little Losers: 

  1. **the story that Ben was telling** , i.e., the (admittedly somewhat dramatic and angsty) romantic comedy of Peter and Balthazar; 
  2. **the story that was hidden from Ben** , i.e., Freddie and Kitso’s forbidden romance; and then
  3. **the story that Ben was hiding from us** , i.e., the breakdown of his relationship with Beatrice.



So these three stories are told, or not-told, in parallel, largely in subtext. [This is why the series appeared to some people to have very little plot.] Some of the subtext appeared in regular episodes or in video descriptions, but that was actually the _main function_ of the songs. Furthermore, there was a certain undertone of mystery that got more urgent as the story developed-–we started to wonder more and more why Ben was posting videos he shouldn’t and why he was so desperately attached to the camera. But again, that was another story being not-told, only alluded to in subtext. And, just like a real person might do, Ben never explained to us what was going on that led to him dropping out of university (anxiety? depression? learning disability? lack of academic support?). 

Basically, Lovely Little Losers is a very intelligent exploration of the vlog format for storytelling. The Candle Wasters really tested its limits:

  * Could they come up with an in-world justification for a scene having two camera angles? Yes! (GUNGE and, especially, ACCOSTED)
  * Could some of the story be told in songs? Yes!
  * Could they tell the story at least partially nonlinearly, i.e. post some footage out of chronological order in such a way that that would make sense in-world and illuminate the events occurring around the time of posting? Yes! (Balth in a Bath; also, the Zoos Job videos, though many of us saw these before they were linked to in the video description of ACCOSTED) 
  * Could the _telling_ of the story affect the story itself? Yes! (PUNISHMENT) [Indeed, it has to; and this comes up in a lot of LIWs.]
  * Could they stay faithful to their goal of realism and still keep a reasonable standard of ethics as far as what got posted? Yes. [Very little footage was captured of people who did not know they were being filmed–only the guerrilla blogging. Ben had some lapses of judgement, definitely, but early on, in the guerrilla vlogging phase, even camera-shy Freddie gave permission for him to post footage of her; the others, though exasperated or disgusted with him, also allowed it. His later lapses of judgement came when he was in a pretty dark place, which doesn’t excuse them at all but does make him real and flawed; plus, those lapses are an important part of the story.]
  * Could they tell a story by _not telling it_? Yes, sort of. 



A final note: _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ also ends rather unsatisfactorily, sort of mid-story. While lolilo was only “inspired by” the play, they have stayed quite true to a lot of its structure–the unhurried plot, the play-within-a-play that never gets fully performed, the multitude of minor characters, the unresolved ending. 

I acknowledge that some might find this show not entirely successful, because most of the characters exhibit problematic behavior that is not always fully explained or apologised for, and because so much is left unresolved or unexplained. But I maintain that those were intentional choices made in favor of realism, and as part of a pretty sophisticated commentary on what vlog-format storytelling can and cannot do. I have rarely felt this convinced that webseries characters were real, nor this intellectually stimulated by the meta-level exploration of the genre.

Essentially, I found this webseries satisfying in a totally different way from a story where everything gets resolved. So thank you, Candle Wasters, for this very complex and fascinating work!


End file.
